Arjun Singh

Arjun grew up watching Hindi films in Lucknow and did not see a Telugu film until he moved to Hyderabad for engineering at nineteen. He went to see one because his new roommate insisted, expecting nothing, and came out genuinely unsettled by how good it was. Over the next few weeks he watched about a dozen more and started thinking seriously about why nobody in his circle back home was paying attention to this stuff.

He started a film review column in the college newsletter as a way to make sense of what he was watching. He had no plan beyond that. Somehow the newsletter ended up with 40,000 monthly readers by his third year, which told him something. He did not complete the engineering degree. He does not regret it.

After dropping out he spent two years at a Hyderabad production house doing script coverage, reading maybe four hundred scripts in that time. Most of them were not very good, which taught him a lot about why the ones that work actually work. He joined DJYoungster to write about Telugu cinema and pan-India releases. He has a particular interest in how South Indian films have changed what Hindi-speaking audiences expect from a mainstream blockbuster, and several of his pieces on why RRR and Pushpa connected the way they did are among the most read on the site.